Set in Paris today, THE FESTIVAL OF INSIGNIFICANCE follows four friends who run into each other in the Luxembourg Gardens, attend parties, and conduct a long-running exchange on sex, desire, history, art, even the meaning of human existence. Alain, one of the friends, is fascinated by the exposed belly buttons of passing women --- the latest fashion --- and takes navel-gazing to imaginative, erotic heights. Another, who has just been told that he does not have cancer, tells a friend that his case is terminal.

The seven years between the birth of Etgar Keret’s son and the death of his father were good years, though still full of reasons to worry. Lev is born in the midst of a terrorist attack. Etgar’s father gets cancer. The threat of constant war looms over their home and permeates daily life. Etgar’s siblings, all very different people who have chosen radically divergent paths in life, come together after his father’s shivah to experience the grief and love that tie a family together forever.

Graham Swift presents a vision of a country, England, that is both a crucible of history and a maze of contemporary confusions. Moving from the 17th century to the present day, from world-shaking events to domestic dramas and frequently mixing tragedy with comedy, ENGLAND AND OTHER STORIES is bound together by an underlying instinct for the story of us all: an evocation of that mysterious thing, a nation, enriched by a clear-eyed compassion for how human individuals find or lose their way in the nationless territory of birth, growing up, sex, aging and death.

Joshua Levin has a reasonably comfortable Chicago apartment, a mildly dysfunctional family sprinkled throughout the suburbs, a steady job teaching ESL, a devoted girlfriend who lives down the block, and a laptop full of screenplay ideas --- one of which he thinks might turn out to be good: Zombie Wars. But all it takes is a few unexpected events for his life to descend into chaos. As the stakes quickly move from absurd to life-and-death matters, THE MAKING OF ZOMBIE WARS takes on real consequence.

From its opening pages on his youthful obsession with motorcycles and speed, ON THE MOVE is infused with Oliver Sacks’ restless energy. As he recounts his experiences as a young neurologist in the early 1960s, first in California, where he struggled with drug addiction, and then in New York, where he discovered a long-forgotten illness in the back wards of a chronic hospital, we see how his engagement with patients comes to define his life.

Bruce Eric Kaplan, also known as BEK, is one of the most celebrated and admired cartoonists in America. I WAS A CHILD is the story of his childhood in words and drawings, in which he recalls growing up in New Jersey with his parents and two older brothers. It would seem like a conventional childhood, although Kaplan’s anecdotes are accompanied by his signature drawings of family outings and life at home --- road trips, milk crates, hamsters, ashtrays, wigs, a platypus and much more.

One hundred and fifty years after Abraham Lincoln’s death, the full story of his extraordinary relationship with Jews is told here for the first time. LINCOLN AND THE JEWS provides readers both with a captivating narrative of his interactions with Jews, and with the opportunity to immerse themselves in rare manuscripts and images --- many from the Shapell Lincoln Collection --- that show Lincoln in a way he has never been seen before.

Jonathan Lethem’s third collection of stories uncovers a father’s nervous breakdown at SeaWorld; a foundling child rescued from the woods during a blizzard; a political prisoner in a hole in a Brooklyn street; and a crumbling, haunted “blog” on a seaside cliff. As in his novels, Lethem finds the uncanny lurking in the mundane, the irrational self-defeat seeping through our upstanding pursuits, and the tragic undertow of the absurd world(s) in which we live.

Award-winning New York Times columnist Roger Cohen turns a compassionate yet discerning eye on the legacy of his own forebears. As he follows them across continents and decades, mapping individual lives that diverge and intertwine, vital patterns of struggle and resilience, valued heritage and evolving loyalties (religious, ethnic and national) converge into a resonant portrait of cultural identity in the modern age.

In HONEYDEW, Edith Pearlman writes with warmth about the predicaments of being human. Whether the characters we encounter are a special child with pentachromatic vision, a group of displaced Somali women adjusting to life in suburban Boston, or a staid professor of Latin unsettled by a random invitation to lecture on the mystery of life and death, Pearlman knows each of them intimately and reveals them to us with unsurpassed generosity.